Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled a redesigned food pyramid earlier this year alongside updated nutrition guidelines to tackle the chronic disease epidemic in the United States and get people eating healthier.
The new version of the pyramid basically flips the old one on its head, prioritizing whole, nutrient-dense foods (think: protein, dairy, vegetables, fruits, healthy fats, and whole grains) and dramatically reducing the consumption of highly processed foods. The updated guidelines, meanwhile, encourage prioritizing protein at every meal and limiting processed foods, added sugars, and artificial additives.
So, what does that mean in practice, especially as it relates to protein and carbohydrates? On Friday’s show, Megyn was joined by Dr. Paul Saladino, founder of Lineage Provisions & Heart and Soil, and Mark Sisson, founder of Peluva, to discuss why what we were told for decades about carbs and protein is wrong and how you should be thinking about them.
Meet the Meats
While meat, particularly red meat, has gotten a bad rap over the years, the narrative is changing. Megyn noted a March 2026 Swedish study that found high meat consumption to be associated with better cognitive trajectories and reduced dementia in certain high-risk populations.
As Saladino explained, the harms and benefits of meat mirror that of any food group in so far as the quality matters. “It was unprocessed red meat,” he said of the study. “Not deli meat, not hot dogs, not bacon, and for a variety of reasons.”
One of the reasons, he noted, is what is added to processed meats. “They often add various types of nitrates as preservatives. Before you eat them, there are compounds called N-nitroso compounds that can be formed and then, in your body, these anti-N-itroso compounds can be formed as well,” Saladino said. “And there’s studies that show that when you eat the processed meat, that is more likely to damage the DNA of your gut epithelial cells and that is probably the beginning of the path to precancerous lesions.”
Unprocessed red meat, meanwhile, doesn’t have the same effect on the gut. “[It] doesn’t really do that to the same degree, if at all,” he said. “But if you’re concerned about red meat because you grew up in the ’90s like I did, then you can eat it with fruit, vitamin C, acidic marinades. You can eat it with vegetables, and that significantly mitigates the formulation of any of these potentially carcinogenic compounds.”
Saladino said that it’s about getting back to basics. “We’re kind of back to this, I think, very reasonable, very sensible perspective that, ‘Hey, look, these are foods that humans have always eaten throughout our history, like eat some plants, eat some meat, and eat very few processed foods, and you’re going to do fine,'” he explained. “And a lot of the narratives to the contrary are just concerning and not based in actual scientific fact, they don’t make sense historically, and they lead humans to be unhealthy.
Carb Un-loading
While red meat may have been, in Megyn’s words, “a boogeyman” for decades, the actual boogeyman in your diet is sugar. Educating people on how to cut down their sugar intake has actually been one of Sisson’s missions. “I have been asked in the past, what is the one thing you would change about your diet that would maybe decrease your risk for pretty much all cause mortality, and it would be getting sugar out of your diet,” he said.
But the sweet stuff’s hold on the brain and body is real. “When we talk about sugar, we’re talking there are a lot of variants of this. There’s the obvious pies, cakes, candies, cookies, sweetened beverages, sweetened drinks, and then sugar added to everything else,” he said. “There’s also, by the way, the concept that most processed grains convert to glucose almost immediately in the body. So, whenever you eat some flour-based processed food – whether it’s pasta, breads, cereals – those convert to glucose. Glucose is sugar.”
“This reliance that we’ve had on carbohydrates as the basis of… the American diet for the last 50 years and somehow suggesting that we get 300 grams a day of carbohydrate in, when you understand that carbohydrate, almost all of it, converts to glucose and… you don’t need that much glucose, so the body either stores it as fat, maybe stores some as glycogen,” Sisson added. “But also it creates this requirement the brain has for living on glucose.”
But that doesn’t mean you have to give up all your sweet treats. Instead, abide by the old adage: Everything in moderation. “A little bit of anything is okay. We’re talking about dosage, right,” Sisson said. “If you can develop metabolic flexibility, if you develop this ability to become good at going long periods of time without eating and not have it affect your mental capacity, your mood, your hunger levels, then a little bit of sweets every once in a while is not a bad thing… I could even make an argument that it might be a good thing.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Saladino and Sisson by tuning in to episode 1,298 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.